The Complete Stories of D H Lawrence Volume 3

 The Complete Stories of D H Lawrence Volume 3

By D H Lawrence

I read these stories aloud to my friend.
One thing that struck me that stood out for me was the courage apparent in this work. The willingness or the entitlement to be able to tell the truth, or a truth, about delicate things in human connection. This is a matter of being able to look at personal relationships and the ambiguities within them directly and report back in a way that even the spouse would see and feel the parallels. Lawrence is a masterful writer who looks deeply into the human conditions of relationship and life and death, to fearlessly express the darkness within as well as the bright joyous parts, the rest of us are left to sheepishly write reviews of the works of the bold, the fearless.

So the reaction of a volume like this, late in the career and short life the a great prolific writer is a call to action and in that a call to life; the expression of what is within more fully and not hold oneself back in reserve and, literally out of the fullness of life for the sake of a notion of keeping the peace, of not upsetting others. This courage to say, “Yes, I think about things in this way and that. I am a confused human sorting things out, but I am still here and with you, until I am not, can no longer be. Let’s go in deeply together.”

For instance, I read Glad Ghosts last. At 40 pages is it the longest story in the book. It took me two hours to read aloud.
It concerned people who have stiffened in relationships, been fearful and undesiring of one another and who ultimately find redemption from and with the spirit of the dead who remain living within them long after the people are gone. It is a remarkable story.
Lawerence in a few of these stories gets into a groove of flord text about the human heart and connection to the elements that was a delight for me to read, perform, to a loved one. The reader is carried along effortlessly on wave upon wave of ideas and emotions in the text. It felt good to speak it and for both of us to hear it.

The Man Who Loved Island, is a strange meditation on wanting isolation, away from and not bothered by others. It felt a kinship to Melvile’s remarkable Bartleby The Scrivener. An isolation flirting with self destruction.

The Blue Moccasins, is a misbegotten May - December marriage in which the younger is the man and trouble comes when he late blooms out in the world.

The Rocking-Horse Winner, has supernatural elements that could make for a Twilight Zone episode.

In Love, has a young couple, friends since childhood coming together as a married couple. But he thinks he has to now play a certain kind of role that alienates and appalls her.  

Things, has a couple of Americans who have found a life living in Europe for a time but then are encumbered by the furnishings that they must forever maintain in storage.

Mother and Daughter, are coupled themselves and cohabitate until a surprising stranger appears to change it all. 

The Overtone, This is one of the best stories in the collection. It involves a couple who through misunderstanding years ago early on cannot connect physically or spiritually.    

But on a certain night in a garden in conversation with a third, a young woman, begin to understand who and what they are and how they can live again. The language in this one is particularly beautiful and poetic.    

Lorenzo in Taos by Mabel Dodge Luhan

This is my first reading of Mabel Dodge Luhan. I first heard of her long ago, but I don’t know from where. It might have been something as silly as Dennis Hopper buying her Taos house with the money from Easy Rider. (It’s a really nice house. One can see photo on the internet. Historical sight now.). She was a rich lady. This might have been the most important thing about her. Even in democratic bootstrap USA, this put her is a position of privilege. This is not so unusual. What is unusual is that she was the type of rich person interested in participating in bohemian culture. There is usually a supply of rich people interested in the arts, after all, if one doesn’t have to work one must do SOMETHING for amusement, to fill the time. The book has some reference to this with people including Lawrence suggesting that she do something, anything, like her own house chores rather than having servants do it. This for her own good. Because she is bored?

 This memoir is of her relationship with novelist D H Lawrence. It was not a particular intimate relationship. It seems, by her account, that this was because of the emotional walls he built. They were not lovers or anything. It is a little unclear if she wanted him for a lover or not, but apparently this did not occur.
(I read this book after reading nonfiction book that has a lot of details in it about syphilis in the late 19th and early 20th century. That book How the Brain Lost Its Mind: Sex, Hysteria, and the Riddle of Mental Illness mentions some notable people who had syphillis and had to deal with the marginally effective to harmfull, treaments for it as well as the disturbing capasity for the disease to vanish in the body only to reapear more horribly later, maybe. The insane asylums of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were filled with people insane from syphilis. The book mentions her as a victim of the disease and it’s treatments without going into much detail. It says that she suppressed until later the memoir material that that struggle. Yet while reading in my mind, I knew that this was somewhere in the background on her text. Sexually transmitted disease in hard to eradicate since people have problem confronting sexuality directly.)

 
Her story is that she invited this famous English novelist to come live in New Mexico more or less as her guest. She is quite interested in the Indians. She wanted D H to be as well, to write a book about them so apparently the white Euro people would finally understand them. She wants him to be a sort of popularizer, in between interpreter, of the spiritual aspects of Indian culture. A rather tall order for an Englishman on his first trip to the USA. Did she think of this as a sort of commission? 

Frieda and DH Lawrence were a globetrotting couple when they showed up in Taos. Globetrotting then consisted of steamships, and railroads, these new 19th century travel technologies. This sped things up considerably beyond the capacities of sail powered ships and pre-railroad land travel. The Lawrences have traveled around the world before they arrive in Taos from the west. They had just gone to try to live in Australia where Lawrence produced the novel Kangaroo, which I have written about earlier. 
Mabel Dodge Luhan was married to an indian. She tells of how this occurred. She says he set up his tent outside her house and wouldn’t leave because he wanted her. And apparently he got her. So she has this kind of vague character of Tony, her husband, in the book, He the strong silent type so we never really know what he is thinking through all this. In a way, while acknowledging the cultural gap between the indigious, recently from basic hunter-gatherer, and the civilized white Euro types, she separates Tony enough from the others that he always seems remote and unknowable. We get her take on what Tony thinks of the Lawrences now and then and it’s usually that he doesn’t really like them around so much.

She goes into her motivation to draw them there. First with a kind of stock disturbing view that sounds like she is well trained by the patriarchy:  “Only a man can change a woman from a devourer into a creator.” Really? Isn’t this kind of the other way around?
“Perhaps I had dimily and intuitively expected Larenzo to be the Transformer for me and had summoned him for that purpose from across the continents. Well, he had come. He had vivified my life and possibly I had done as much for him. But apparently nothing significant had come of it beyond the momentary illuminations that flashed between us and that always ended in the fretful and frustrating hours of bewilderment.”
This strikes me as an odd sort of buyer’s remorse. The man was an obsessed writer and in a complicated marriage in a forgien land, and he was a poor kid from the coal country in England. Way out of any familiar elements. Her expectations of him feel extreme.

As a reader of some of the novels of Lawrence I don’t think I would look at him at all as much of a savior or answer man for anyone really, not even for himself. He questions a lot and wonders about a better path. Yes, it seems spiritual in some way, and wonders about a connection to ancient ways of human association. He doesn’t provide a path to it. I can understand that Luhan would associate that with the world of the native Americans. I think she was trying to give insight from the indians to Lawrence and get something from him in return, become her “Transformer”.
He writes to her about some confused emotions he apparently thought she had between her feelings for Tony and DH.
“You need have no split between Tony and me: never: if you stick to what is real in your feeling in each direction. Your real feeling in two directions won’t cause any disharmony.--But don’t try to transfer to Tony feelings that don’t belong to him: admit all the limitations, simply. And never again try to transfer to me: admit the limitations there too.”

Included with the memoir are a number of letters Lawrence sent her. Some are part of the memoir itself, and several are dumped into the end. None of these at the end have any explanatory notes attached to them so it’s easy to be at a loss regarding some of things and people he refers to. These letters at the end of the book are all from after Frieda and DH left Taos for more traveling. (And seeing her children. Luhan does tell us that these two have a troubled relationship. Frieda had left a husband and three children to be with Lawrence who, according to this book, did not permit her to see the children. Yet in the letters from DH he talks about Frieda being off with her children and Frieda writes of this too. I don’t know the whole story. Luhan also mentions the hard time the Lawrences had with his fellow Brits and the government authorities during WWI because she was German. He writes about this extensively in Kangaroo.)

The end of the book letters are not really letters between close intimates. This whole book has the slight distaste of a woman trying to buy access to one of the great novelists of her day and that her plan just didn’t work out. After they leave Lawrence is more of less ill for the remainder of his life. He died very young, age 44. (I would like to think that he had a flash at the end of the eternal bonding with the basic at the very end as being maybe what he was searching for all along.) 
After they are gone from Taos Luhan sends him part of her memoirs that she intends to publish. He is supportive and gives her input repeating this in letters. He tells her to publish it herself in consecutive letters and strongly suggests that she ought to change all the names of others in the text. It seems that she is writing about her Greenwich Village artist bohemian socialist salon days when she had a relationship with famous journalist John Reed.
He shares his notions about writing with power and conviction:
“Heaven knows what it is to be honest in writing. One has to write from some point of view, to leave all other aspects, from all the remaining points of view, to be conjectured. One can’t write without feeling--and feeling is bias. The only thing to put down on paper is one’s own honest-to goodness feeling.”

In this end letter section it is clear that the searching wealthy Luhan has continued to search. From reading his letters it is clear that she is really into Gurdjeff and keep trying to get Lawrence to go sit with him or whatever one did with Gurdjeff. DH is resistant all the way. He doesn’t want Gurdjeff, and is tired of a certain type of searching, but she keeps on telling him to go. He never does, of course.
By 1928 he has written Lady Chatterley’s Lover and tells her he plans to publish it himself of an uncensored version and needs the money. He prints 1000 copies to sell for $10 each. This of course worked out well, and he died two years later.

A mere two years after his death she publishes this book. She claims in the beginning that she sent it to Frieda who was OK with it and said that DH was better at the end. I assume she meant different from the not that pleasant depiction of Luhan’s, but this is all rather vague.

Reading this with little other information is like hanging out with someone who complains about someone else unknown to the listener. It is impossible to discern the truth of the matter in other people’s complicated relationships.

This book quite interesting at the beginning, but it slowed since it wasn’t all that deep and felt a little too gossipy-celebrity in an old school literature culture sort of way.

Kangaroo by D H Lawrence

This novel is from 1922 and it reflects the trauma of the time after World War I.

Much of this trauma is personal, within. Big human events can cause questions, wondering, how this can be avoided in the future and how is this global world going to get on. The reverberations of the war are also in the people in one way or another, their movements and desires.

There is a bit of a meandering on the road plot to this novel but it is mainly a 365 page journey into the interior of the Richard character. It’s a story about how to deal with other humans. The plot is not the thing here. There is not much action. It feels like a pre-cinema a world view.

Australia is the setting for a story constructed to explore all this internal work. The character, Kangaroo, is a Australian lawyer. He is also a wannabe dictator who has attracted a band of followers mostly made up veterans from the war in Europe who have not had that type of excitement and bonding since.

A globe hopping English writer Richard and his not English wife Harriet land in Australia and Richard is seduced into this right wing oddball male scene through being rather reluctantly neighborly.

There is also a left wing working class socialist movement.
Yet a lot of the drama is the strange need of this Kangaroo man to be loved and followed. Kangaroo is a nickname for the lawyer leader man. The socialist have a leader too and there is a scene with him trying to recruit Richard as well because he is a writer of some note and renown. But he is nowhere near as grasping, needy, and ultimately grotesquely pathetic as Kangaroo. It shows the sick need if this type of narcissistic political, cult, or personal “leader”.

All this is set up really to look into an individual's place among others personally and politically. It works very well that way. We follow Richard as he is being seduced into “loving” Kangaroo, the fascist impulse stand-in. We feel the writer confronting these ideas within himself. He is a man open to ideas and faces the risk in that, he could be swept away. Fear of that makes him perhaps rigidly noncommittal. Open to ideas but rejecting all action options. Avoiding the associations and actions that can make the idea manifest. The novel is cogitation on these big waves of human political energy building up out of industrialization. Socialism and fascism.

Richard finds himself being pulled by both poles. The minimal suspense of the piece is in which will he choose. It might be useful for the reader to see this in context of 1922, before the triumph of German fascism and the horrible results, into and during WWII. And the Soviet Union was brand new. Everything was new and with a sweepingly rapid industrialization. We are at the edge and near the end of the greater  British Empire but 20th Century was still to come.

Yet Richard doesn’t want to choose, cannot choose. He does not trust this human, male, energy that tries to use grand ideas and romantic sentimentality to change the world. He distrusts this and feels silly when he notes it rising up in himself.

But he wants connection to something. He craves it. He has a sort of idiosyncratic philosophical/spiritual point of view. If he and all could be more attentive to some natural force a god in everything maybe things could somehow set right, otherwise the left and right are two sides of the same thing. It’s not that stark, he does make a stand and chooses a side in a noncommittal way. It would have been disappointing otherwise and he makes the correct choice even if he isn’t exactly joining up. After all few really do.

There is a long illuminating diversion into Richard and Harriet’s experience in England during the war. This reflects the actual war time experience of D H Lawrence. It is the outsider, the objector, dealing with a bonded unified nation’s jingoistic environment. This sort of thing apparently never changes.

On the personal level the novel depicts a lot of loneliness and desire. There is a craving for male bonding. A real love, caring, and trust between males as is available sometimes between men and women.

But Richard can’t  fit himself into any of that as much as he might want it or is interested in it. The whole construction of the settings for this male bonding do not work for him. He is simply not a team player up for any of these surface bonding programs that we make available. He doesn’t want to be touched. Is that because he needs to be touched too much if at all? He sees the limits and social dangers of any variance. It’s as if the an old type of male connection was removed in the construction of the commercial competitive world. The limits set in the bonding environments made available are not removed from the domination of a power hungry dualist world view. The business connections, military connections, sport fan bonding; all have a sort of ritual structure prohibiting spontaneity.

He wants another sort of connection out of his general spiritual outlook. He wants the humans to feel the flow or energy from the earth and reconnect with and through that rather than pretending to be something separate.

And there is really the only small hope for the redemption of humans.

The notion is that this type of bonding could be more open, not so much a dance of the restricted roles of mainstream male bonding. But that hazards opening to territory forbidden wherein, of course, there is some hope and danger.

There is mystery here. His notions are not exactly named. He calls part of it his dark god. But this is unseen and unnameable rather than dark equals evil.

He embraces mystery over knowing, naming, and structure. Yet craves connection to the mysterious structure beyond intellectual and emotional decisions. A surrender that would not have to be made.

Kangaroo offers a transparently artificial option for this. The novel could also be a warning about that type. The power hungry eager to exploit this spirit, hope, love, and our need to belong.

In a way Richard is a sort of fugitive wandering to the next stop in a trip initiated by disgust with his own homeland.

—-

I have been watching some film adaptations of Lawrence’s work recently. This is the first time I have read him since I was a young man, maybe 40 years ago. I had read The Rainbow back then and remember liking it but not much else about it.
I saw an interesting movie version of Kangaroo that made me read the book which is a lot better of course. The movie is good though.
After reading Kangaroo I read the wiki page on D H Lawrence and also about Australia. The book mentions it being a new nation and that is so have become one in 1901 after being a native homeland and used as a penal colony for a couple hundred years earlier by British colonialist invaders.  
That is where I got that Lawrence was relaying his actual war time struggles in the chapter about that.

Kangaroo feels like real writing to me. Telling the truth from the heart and the brain. It feels open and courageous. I can easily relate to his difficulties with men, and it's perhaps underlying homophobia, or if not phobia, but doubt as to if there is a compartment in which to put that neatly.  And really is there time for more caring? After all we need to make a living etc other than manage relationships. Richard and Harriet are a committed couple disagreements aside. That’s one intense relationship. D H Lawrence left a lot of writing in his short life. He must have had to push people off for that time, maybe it’s not that hard to not choose additional relationship if one is a solitary type to begin with and spend the time thinking and writing about it instead. Writing about wanting it at least is a guarantee of production. A relationship can leave one with nothing to show. Perhaps that is why we we remain disconnected. We need to be productive not just hang out in Eden.

This book was a joy for me to read and I felt a real connection to the main character, the conflicts, and his alienation.